Why Blogday2007 down in China

It's Blogday again, but this year, bloggers in China, Taiwan and Hongkong seems to be lazy to celebrate this day, what's the problem?

I had a short conversation with Nir Ofir, the blogday's initiator. He gave me a link to his blogday video, however the video is hosted in Google Video where people in China can't see. This remind me that China bloggers have a very difficult time, they (here i use "they" as a geography concept, I'm in Kuala Lumpur now) are forbidden to visit many foreign websites, let alone to use some widely-used web services. China bloggers are trying to get used to the online life without international media and services, but recently the out of feedburner sorely struke them. Because of this, many China bloggers showed little enthusiasm.

There are other reasons to explain why Blogday become less attractive this year:

1. Nir didn't have enough time to seed it this year. I don't think it's smart to blame Nir, as he said "I just initiated it...people are free to do hat they want. Bloggers in Peru and Cambodia did a meetup/ conference..Other did videos...etc"
2. China Bloggers feel Blogday should be creative, not only post recommendations. As Yo2's initiator Oneoo complained that "Chinese users are most difficult to be satisfied." I asked some bloggers why they don't post blogday, and got a short but clear answer - it's boring!
   
3. Lack of pre-promotion. Don't you think it's odd to promote a day just on that day? People need time to prepare, and all pre-promotion work should be done before blogday. As far as I know, few bloggers placed blogday badge in their blog, and no acticles about blogday2007 were posted before this day.

Technorati Tag: blogday2007

FeedBurner Feeds are Unavailable in China

It's sad to know that feedburner feeds are unable to be visited by people who use China Telecom broadband, but worse news may come to us in a few days, because we are sure that this "accident" is caused by Government-based internet supervisory systems and blogger Williamlong has proved it (in Chinese).

I hope feedburner is temporarily blocked, like what it has been one year ago. However, this time it's possibly banned for long... Associating that Jinan and Shantou Telecom dared to suspend thousands of innocent servers without negotiation nor notifying , how can I confidently say that a foreign website which contains countless "sensitive information" will survive?

If you are as disappoint as I am, you can:

1. stop blogging!
   
2. switch to other foreign online RSS Readers, like Google reader and Bloglines.
3. persuade your readers to subscribe your original RSS feed, or use Feedsky as a substitute. (example http://feed.feedsky.com/yaiyee)
   
4. say goodbye to China.

More questions after Flickr banned

After Flickr was blocked in China, I've introduced Williamlong's idea of making flickr-hosted photos visitable to websites readers. And i supposed that most flickr and firefox users knew that there was an fantastic add-on Access Flickr! which worked very well.

Today, i received an email from John Pasden, and he asked How does Access Flickr! work and if it works similarly to the IP proxy method I've mentioned before?

For the first question, we can do an analysis by ourselves: Download Access Flickr! add-on (access_flickr!-1.5-fx.xpi), unzip it, open a file named overlay.js and will see the following content which tells how the add-on work

var exchangeSource = new Array(
/^([^\.]*\.?)farm2.static.flickr.com$/i, //4
/^([^\.]*\.?)static.flickr.com$/i, //3
/^([^\.]*\.?)blog.flickr.com$/i, //2
/^([^\.]*\.?)flickr.com$/i //1
);

var exchangeDest = new Array(
'storage2.flickr.vip.re2.yahoo.com', //4
'storage1.flickr.vip.re2.yahoo.com', //3
'flickr.blogs.com', //2
'www.flickr.mud.yahoo.com' //1
);

As the codes show, Access Flickr! works as an automatic tool that substitute banned image URLs with other known URLs pointing to the same host! This method is quite different from the IP proxy method, hence, the latter doesn't work for flickr.

John Pasden also asks if there are any solutions that all visitors will be able to see the Flickr-hosted photos on his site without Access Flickr! The answer is YES, just refer to this post for detail operation, Wordpress users can use this plugin(via) which will automatically replace the blocked Flickr URLs .